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FRENCH 219:The Renaissance Body in French Literature and Medicine (FRENCH 319)

If the Renaissance is famous for discovering unknown continents and ancient texts the body too was a new territory of conquest. How did literature respond to the rise of an anatomical gaze in the arts and in medicine and how did it stage the aesthetic religious philosophical and moral issues related to such a promotion or deconstruction of the body? Does literature aim at representing the body or does it use it instead as a ubiquitous signifier for intellectual emotional and political ideas? The locus of desire, pleasure and disease, the body also functioned as a reminder of human mortality and was caught in the web of gender issues, religious controversies and new norms of behavior. Texts from prose fiction (Rabelais) poetry (Scève Ronsard Labé D'Aubigné) essays (Montaigne) and emblem literature. Extra documents include music scores tapestries paintings philosophical and anatomical plates from medical treatises. Taught in English; readings in French and English.

Casablanca, Algiers and Tunis embody three territories, real and imaginary, which never cease to challenge the preconceptions of travelers setting sight on their shores. In this class, we will explore the myriad ways in which these cities of North Africa, on the edge of Europe and of Africa, have been narrated in literature, cinema, and popular culture. Home to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, they are an ebullient laboratory of social, political, religious, and cultural issues, global and local, between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. We will look at mass images of these cities, from films to maps, novels to photographs, sketching a new vision of these magnets as places where power, social rituals, legacies of the Ottoman and French colonial pasts, and the influence of the global economy collude and collide. Special focus on class, gender, and race.

FRENCH 238:Art and the Market (ARTHIST 238C)

This course examines the relationship between art and the market, from the château-builders of the French Renaissance to avant-garde painters in the nineteenth-century Salon des Refusés. Using examples drawn from France, this course explores the relationship between artists and patrons, the changing status of artists in society, patterns of shifting taste, and the effects of museums on making and collecting art. Students will read a mixture of historical texts about art and artists, fictional works depicting the process of artistic creation, and theoretical analyses of the politics embedded in artworks. They will engage in sustained analysis of individual artworks, as well as the market structures in which such artworks were produced and bought. The course will be taught in English, with the option of readings in French for departmental majors.

Last offered: Spring 2019
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI

FRENCH 239:The Afterlife of the Middle Ages (FRENCH 339)

Literary works that evoke a medieval past in contrast to a historical present, and critical texts that treat aspects of the medieval or medievalism. How does the concept of medievalism emerge and evolve through the ages? Topics include periodization, philology, critical theory, the study of Gothic architecture, and the use of the term medieval in modern political discourse and postcolonial studies. Authors include Burckhardt, Camille, Chateaubriand, Chrétien de Troyes, Didi-Huberman, Jauss, Michelet, Panofsky, Pound, films by Dreyer and Bergman, and contemporary poetry. Taught in English.

Last offered: Autumn 2017
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

FRENCH 246:Body over Mind (FRENCH 346, ITALIAN 346)

How does modern fiction, aided by modern philosophy, give the lie to Descartes' famous "I think therefore I am"? And how does writing convey the desire for a different, perhaps stronger, integration of mind and body? Does the body speak a particular truth that we must learn to hear, that the mind is not always connected to? How do modern metaphors for the mind-body connection shape our experience? These questions will be explored via the works of major French and Italian writers and thinkers, including Pirandello, Calvino, Camus, Houellebecq, Sartre, and Agamben.

Last offered: Autumn 2016
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

FRENCH 249:The Algerian Wars (CSRE 249, HISTORY 239G, JEWISHST 249)

From Algiers the White to Algiers the Red, Algiers, the Mecca of the Revolutionaries in the words of Amilcar Cabral, this course offers to study the Algerian Wars since the French conquest of Algeria (1830-) to the Algerian civil war of the 1990s. We will revisit the ways in which the war has been narrated in literature and cinema, popular culture, and political discourse. A special focus will be given to the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). The course considers the racial representations of the war in the media, the continuing legacies surrounding the conflict in France, Africa, and the United States, from Che Guevara to the Black Panthers. A key focus will be the transmission of collective memory through transnational lenses, and analyses of commemorative events and movies. nReadings from James Baldwin, Assia Djebar, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, Mouloud Feraoun. Movies include "The Battle of Algiers," "Days of Glory," and "Viva Laldjérie." nTaught in English.

FRENCH 252:Art and Power: From Royal Spectacle to Revolutionary Ritual (ARTHIST 252A)

From the Palace of Versailles to grand operas to Jacques-Louis David's portraits of revolutionary martyrs, rarely have the arts been so powerfully mobilized by the State as in early modern France. This course examines how the arts were used from Louis XIV to the Revolution in order to broadcast political authority across Europe. We will also consider the resistance to such attempts to elicit shock-and-awe through artistic patronage. By studying music, architecture, garden design, the visual arts, and theater together, students will gain a new perspective on works of art in their political contexts. But we will also examine the libelous pamphlets and satirical cartoons that turned the monarchy¿s grandeur against itself, ending the course with an examination of the new artistic regime of the French Revolution. The course will be taught in English with the option of French readings for departmental majors.

Last offered: Spring 2018
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI

FRENCH 260A:Transcultural Perspectives of South-East Asian Music and Arts (MUSIC 146N, MUSIC 246N)

This course will explore the links between aspects of South-East Asian cultures and their influence on modern and contemporary Western art and literature, particularly in France; examples of this influence include Claude Debussy (Gamelan music), Jacques Charpentier (Karnatak music), Auguste Rodin (Khmer art) and Antonin Artaud (Balinese theater). In the course of these interdisciplinary analyses - focalized on music and dance but not limited to it - we will confront key notions in relation to transculturality: orientalism, appropriation, auto-ethnography, nostalgia, exoticism and cosmopolitanism. We will also consider transculturality interior to contemporary creation, through the work of contemporary composers such as Tran Kim Ng¿c, Chinary Ung and Tôn-Thât Tiêt. Viewings of sculptures, marionette theater, ballet, opera and cinema will also play an integral role. To be eligible for WAYS credit, this course must be taken for 3 units and a letter grade; WIM credit in Music at 4 units and a letter grade.

FRENCH 266:Food, Text, Music: A Multidisciplinary Lab on the Art of Feasting (FRENCH 166, FRENCH 366, MUSIC 133, MUSIC 333)

Students cook a collection of unfamiliar recipes each week while learning about the cultural milieus in which they originated. The course focuses on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a time of great banquets that brought together chefs, visual artists, poets, musicians, and dancers. Students read late-medieval cookbooks under the guidance of professional chefs, learn songs and poetry with the help of visiting performers, and delve into a burgeoning scholarly literature on food history and sensory experience. We will also study trade routes and food networks, the environmental impact of large-scale banquets, the science of food, and the politics of plenty. This course may count towards the Medieval component of the French major, and corresponds to
DLCL 121, a course requirement for the Medieval Studies Minor. Students interested in applying for course must email the professor (jrodin@stanford.edu) by 20 September with a statement of up to 350 words that includes: (a) reasons for wanting to take the class; (b) relevant background in cooking/medieval studies/etc.; (c) stated commitment to attend all ten course meetings; and (d) any dietary restrictions/preferences.

Long before the 2017 #Metoo campaign, French women writers have explored through powerful fictions and autobiographies the different shades of economic, social, psychological, physical, or sexual violence that is exerted against, but also by and between, women. How does literature - the power of words - address, deconstruct or comfort power dynamics (during sex and between the sexes) that are usually silenced, taboo or unspeakable? Themes explored: sex and gender, sex and power, rape culture, sexual and moral taboos (incest, abortion, pornography, infanticide, lesbianism), the body as social stigma or source of meaning. Special attention given to narrative and descriptive strategies designed to avert, expose, deconstruct or account for specifically feminine experiences (rape, orgasm, pregnancy). Authors include Marie Darrieusecq, Christine Angot, Annie Ernaux, Marie NDiaye, Virginie Despentes, Leila Slimani, Ivan Jablonka along with feminist theory. Taught in French.